PIONEER GIRL PERSPECTIVES

Nonfiction

Full and fruitful humanity

PIONEER GIRL PERSPECTIVES:
Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder

Edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal

300 pages, South Dakota Historical Society Press

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

This is not a book for beginners, but a collection of essays for those with a scholarly appreciation of the life and work of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It follows an earlier book, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, which was an unexpected bestseller in 2014.

Wilder’s world-famous Little House series originated from her unpublished “Pioneer Girl” manuscript, written in 1930. When the South Dakota Historical Society Press annotated and published the annotated autobiography in 2014, the 15,000-copy print run sold out in three weeks. The small press found itself with a runaway bestseller, going through eight printings and selling more than 150,000 copies in the first year. 

Reporters and critics asked, “What is the appeal?” The South Dakota editors wondered, “What made Wilder and her books resonate with so many people in so many countries?”

Nancy Tystad Koupal, founder of the South Dakota Historical Society Press and publisher of Pioneer Girl, has addressed those issues with the publication of this new volume. She explains in the introduction that she asked questions of “a variety of people with various perspectives on Wilder—those who had already written about her and those who had not but who studied children’s literature or women’s history more broadly.” She told her ten chosen writers to “comment on the appeal, relevance, and thinking of Wilder” and to “take the discussion in any direction that you deem appropriate.”

The essays are divided into four sections: “Working Writers,” “Beginnings and Misdirections,” “Wilder’s Place and Time,” and “Enduring Tales and Childhood Myths.” The first writer is Wilder herself, in a reprint of her speech at the Detroit Book Fair in 1937. “I was past 60 when I wrote my first book, The Little House in the Big Woods,” she wrote.the  

When to my surprise the book made such a success and children from all over the U.S. wrote to me begging for more stories, I began to think what a wonderful childhood I had had. ... I realized that I had seen and lived it all—all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman then the pioneer, then the farmers and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.

Essayists in Pioneer Girl Perspectives include Wilder biographer William Anderson telling the story of getting Pioneer Girl into print, history professor Paula Nelson talking about women’s roles in Wilder’s lifetime, and American literature professor Ann Romines discussing why there were no deaths or old people in Wilder’s Little House series. While growing up with the Little House books, Romines writes, “I did not notice two significant facts about those enchanting books. First, there are (almost) no old people in them. And second, except for a few unnamed victims of weather-related accidents, no one dies in the Little House books. Now, at a later stage in my own life, these facts leap out at me and raise compelling questions.” She concludes that “we need to know how a fragile frontier family, on the road with limited resources and unlimited hard times, manages to create a portable safe space where children can grow into full and fruitful humanity, strong enough to deal with all the various and uncensored stories that life is going to thrust before them.”

Some of the information in the essays is repetitive, as authors approach the same topics and source material from different perspectives. This repetition serves to build toward the whole. Pioneer Girl Perspectives fits into a logical progression for a reader like me, who grew up reading the Little House books and who has read and reviewed a number of books on Wilder. 

The essays might be challenging to a reader unfamiliar with Wilder’s life. If you already know that her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, helped write the Little House books, if you already know those books are historical fiction rather than fact, if you already know Wilder and Lane believed government should stay out of personal lives, then you will better appreciate the additional insights offered by Pioneer Girl Perspectives.

--Diane Diekman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who grew up in South Dakota and currently lives in Sioux Falls. Her biographies are Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story and Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins.